The name was devilishly difficult, but one would have to remember it, this was what Lord Byron, who had been enthusiastic about reading Franz Grillparzer’s early play “Sappho”, demanded more than 200 years ago. “Do you know Grillparzer?” A hundred years later, Rosa Luxemburg asked in a letter she wrote to her friend Hans Diefenbach from prison: “I really love this one.” and Franz Kafka read the story “Der arme Spielmann” from 1848 so often that he almost knew it by heart. In the unfit civil servant who is overwhelmed when it comes to love issues, who has lost his subordinate position and makes his living as an amateur beggar violinist, he felt so well taken that he used to read the story to those women with whom one of his problematic love relationships was about to begin .
The admired adventurer among the rebels of Romanticism, the broad-minded communist revolutionary, the scrupulous writer who gave his name to a new, “Kafkaesque” world feeling: how can it be, having had three such admirers and still having a reputation to have been an ossified bureaucrat in life and to have become a dusty classic as a poet?
To make Franz Grillparzer the theatre for a long time a remarkably wide arc, as if even the most original of the zampanos of the director’s theater no longer knew what to do with his polished dramas. A look at the dramatic work of the author, who was born in 1791, makes this fact seem downright puzzling. Grillparzer created a number of female figures whose inner conflicts, external hardships and tragic failures would be worth discussing today. As is often the case with Grillparzer, “Medea” is about the violent transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, in which he saw the dawn of a destructive capitalism. In “The Waves of the Sea and Love” he has drawn a Greek priestess who uncompromisingly dares to love a man who is forbidden to her and who has equal rights with her.
War is not just the backdrop, it is the event that defines life
Grillparzer’s male heroes, who screamed and murdered in their efforts to conform to the heroic tradition, by no means have his sympathy, but are instead identified as primitives and violent men who are ready to strike. Medea complains about her Jason: “If fame lures him, he kills someone/ If he wants a wife, he gets one for himself/ Whatever breaks about it, what does it matter to him!” Almost all the men who develop positive traits in his dramas are broken, self-doubting, soft and, according to the character catalog of his time, strongly “feminine” characters.
Grillparzer has placed almost no figure on the stage floor that would be completely one with itself. The differentiation of his theatrical artistic language points far beyond his time. To call his characters contradictory would be to fall short; rather, what the cultural scientist Thomas Bauer described as that “ambiguity” that many people find so difficult to endure today applies to them: they fall from one moment to the next from megalomania to faintheartedness, from triumphant self-confidence to trembling self-doubt, their characters are ambiguous, often an annoyance to themselves and a mystery to others.
There is one more thing that makes Grillparzer almost startlingly up-to-date. He is the German-speaking dramatist of war par excellence, the war is not just the backdrop, the dramaturgical framework, it is rather the devastating event that determines the life of each individual. From “King Ottokar’s Luck and the End” to “Brothers’ Quarrels in the House of Habsburg”, the war is constantly present, not as a playing field on which the hero has to prove himself, but as a blood-soaked battlefield on which everyone perishes, be it that his body is cut up or his soul is shattered.
“The path of the new education goes/ From humanity/ Through nationality/ To bestiality.”
Grillparzer was born in 1791 when the French Revolution was at its height. When the Napoleonic armies occupied Vienna for the second time in 1809, he did not regard them as harbingers of civil liberty, but rather as violent occupiers; and Napoleon, by which he remained fascinated throughout his life, became a larger-than-life figure of mischief, casting its shadow over the world to come. From an early age, Grillparzer understood the rule of the Habsburgs as the fate of his life: “Nature, why did you let me be born in this country,” he wrote in his “Diary”, which was only published posthumously and is still oppressive reading today.
Nonetheless, he served the Habsburg state as a dutiful civil servant for 43 years before he was allowed to retire with the rank of Hofrat. Gradually he trusted only the Habsburgs to prevent or at least delay the dawn of a soulless modernity: capitalism would drive people into isolation, unleashed individualism would create sheer tyrants who would destroy the unity of the world.
As a result of this bitter insight, the rebellious artist became a patriotic subject. In his diaries he continued to complain bitterly and sarcastically about the Austrian misery, about the stubbornness of the rulers who had erected an insurmountable “Chinese wall” around Austria. At the same time, he supported the imperial policy, which increasingly relied on immobility and decreed political standstill. If the rigid system was criticized somewhere, he initially almost always sympathized with those who rebelled, but he soon recoiled because he feared nothing more than that the democratic movements of the individual nations and nationalities would burst open the supranational state of the Danube monarchy: “The way of the new education goes/ From humanity/ Through nationality/ To bestiality.”
From 1848 onwards, Grillparzer wrote almost exclusively for the drawer, his last dramas were all first performed after his death. Also the wondrous piece about the Bohemian legendary queen “Libussa”, representative of the golden age, of matriarchy, who has to witness how her beloved “prince consort” breaks the new ground of tyranny, private property, unlimited individualism. “People are good, they just have a lot to do/ And how they do this and that individually/ The coherence of the whole escapes them…” Libussa sums up the new one in words that could also be found in a play by Brecht Time. But after this a new, better one will come, the “time of the seers and the gifted”, and for Grillparzer that was the world of the day before yesterday: “And when the heavens closed,/ the earth rises up into its place,/ The gods dwell in the breast again,/ And human value is then called their superior and one.”
Grillparzer, the disgruntled Hof- und Reichsrat, died on January 21, 1872, buried under medals and decorations while he was still alive, in the image of a state poet, who admittedly recorded in his diaries: “I don’t know, attacked by tormenting thoughts like dogs which side I turn to.